ABSTRACT
Asad’s comments are made in the context of broad reflections on religion, state and secularism, but they also provide a useful way of approaching the online forums that are the focus of this article. “Have Your Say” forums may be presented as “empty spaces” for the exercise of free speech (Hain 2000; Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO] 2006). However, they are moderated to ensure compliance with house rules; the topics discussed are selected by editors, or through some kind of blog dialogue; discussions are seeded by carefully crafted comments and media feeds in a particular international news environment, and in some cases debates are shaped in their appearance through user recommendation. Furthermore, behind the existence of the forums there is also the entire political narrative of how BBC forums come to be funded, which includes relationships between government, the FCO and the BBC World Service (BBCWS), through which World Service targets are set and performance assessed, and between different branches of the BBC, especially the World Service and bbcnews.com,
which shape the flow of content across BBC platforms, including blogs and forums. In these flows and relationships, Asad’s broader concerns about the articulation between the mutually defined categories of religion, state and secularism also surface, since each of these levels contributes to shaping how forum users and viewers “exist and are made to exist for each other”.
